Tag Sleep

Dreamscape

Michael 8 Comments

If you read enough blogs over enough time, you will read at least one dream story from every blogger. Except me. I don’t recall once over the past 14 years and who knows how many posts, that I’ve ever written about my dreams. Or so it seems. Until now.

I’m not one to have recurring dreams. At least not that I know based on the ones I remember. I do have recurring dream themes and they seem to play out like a serial drama, or perhaps like a soap opera. Never really ending but different stories lines coming and going. But the same movie, night after night? Nope. No encore presentations.

But now, for the last few weeks – no, for the last few months, I seem to have hit upon a recurring dream, or else I am experiencing a dream-like occurrence. Every night, at nearly always at 3:15 in the morning, I wake up, check the time, and go back to sleep. There doesn’t seem to be an outside stimulus causing this. No odd noises from outside. Nothing consistent inside like the furnace kicking on at the same time every day. (Who designed furnaces, by the way? Did they specify manufacturers find the loudest switches known to man to activate their heating cycles?)

I thought this over and came up with this assumption. I typically am asleep by 11 and awake by 7, so 3am is my personal “middle of the night.” I may must have developed some cyclic response to my circadian rhythm whereby I wake myself once during the middle of the night to reset whatever needs reset in the sleeping body. It sounded good to me, and I continued along with my jaunty ‘4 hour sleep, short break, 4 hour sleep’ nightly pattern.

Then one day I happened to check the sleep chart on my phone. Although I had a few brief waking moments that I didn’t remember having, the three o’clock hour came and went with me never leaving a sleep state, when I did remember waking up. Did I dream that I was awake checking the clock, then rolling over and resuming my snooze. I checked other days, and found a disbursing pattern of sleep during the very time I knew I was awake? Or was that during the very time I was dreaming that I was awake?

Spooky. Weird. Michael-like. Whatever you call it, I guess I now have a dream story to put out there. If only I knew what it meant.

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Speaking of dreams, did you ever dream about how you connect with others? (Yes, I know that is stretching the bounds of segue-ism. Bear with me.) (Please.) We dream of a world where we all treat each other like members of the same club, players on the same team, kids from the same family. (I told you it was a stretch.) What kind of club would the Human Club look like. We talk about that and what the dues to belong might cost in this week’s Uplift! Check it out. While you’re there, consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

Take a peek – Get your rests

Michael 6 Comments

It’s time for another peek at what’s going on at ROAMcare this week. In yesterday’s Uplift blog we talked about the 4 kinds of rest we need for happier days as well as peaceful nights.

Get Your Rest

Posted September 11, 2024
3 minute read

“I feel like I sleep walked through the day. Being a couch potato isn’t so bad.” Diem didn’t put a question mark at the end of that but Michael, a part-time potato himself, treated it as if she had, and responded, “No, being a couch potato is good way to recharge.” Truthfully, we aren’t sure that it is an ideal recharging method. We do know, however, any down time renews energy needed for all the up times.

Rest is a state most people find hard to come by. No matter how many breaks throughout the day or how uninterrupted a night’s sleep might be, so often it never seems to be enough to feel truly well rested.

We can most often combine physical, mental, emotional, and sensory needed rests in a single quality rest target. Trying to separate the four is like trying to unbraid a rope. You end up with 4 strings but together they are stronger than any of the four alone. What affects one, affects all. Both ways

Read the rest of Get Your Rests and see why we say if you want to improve how you get through the day, you really need  to get your rests – all of them!

Uplift 2024

Water, Water Everywhere

Michael 11 Comments

There is something strange going on with water. More than usual strange. What. You don’t think water is strange? How else do explain that water can make the Grand Canyon but can’t wash peanut butter off a knife in the dishwasher? Strange!  But that’s not the kind of water strange (strange water?) I’m talking about. I have a whole different kind of strange going on.

I am a relatively sound sleeper. Years of rotating shifts, working very early hours, and being on call, while still having to function in a world that pays homage to 9-5 for basic business functions like banking and haircuts meant I had to be able to sleep through just about anything to get any kind of rejuvenating rest. Unless it was a child’s cry or a job’s beeper I slept through it. (Yes, beeper. You know the world didn’t always have cell phones. Back in the 70s if you had a job that required you to be reachable you carried a pager.) (Even if you weren’t an international drug smuggler.) It had to be the right pitch for a sound to get through to me while I was sleeping. Otherwise, I had been told, a bomb could go off next to the bed and I’d never hear it.

Well, let’s fast forward to today. The child is grown and she might still cry at night over some things but since she is about 12 miles away I won’t hear it. Usually. And the pages, whether through a beeper or later a cell phone, stopped about 3 months after I retired. (Some people were slow to get the message.) But my ability to sleep through anything is still functioning. Mostly. I can still tune out just about any external stimuli but I’m almost always awakened once during the night to….ah…..you know.

NiagraFallsEvery night I go to sleep with a bottle of water on my night stand. (You knew we’d get back to water eventually. Congratulations on hanging in there with me this far!)  I never remember drinking any of it but every morning when I get up it’s at least half empty. Not only do I never remember drinking any water, I don’t remember ever being awake during the night. (Um, unless I get up to…ah…, moving on.)

Am I a sleep drinker? Do I have such a water craving that I reach over, grab and uncap the bottle, glug away at a few ounces, replace the cap, and return the bottle to its place on the nightstand all without waking? If I didn’t have water next to me would I be sleep walking to the kitchen then sleep pouring a glass full so I could get my water fix during the night?

How does that happen? I have to figure it out. This is something I’m going to have to think on until I come up with a reasonable explanation about how I can drink and sleep at the same time. Unless it’s not me. I still haven’t solved the mystery of the open doors, drawers, and other front pieces. Perhaps with all their nocturnal activities the house fairies have now developed a need to wet their whistles.

I’d like to think I’m not so oblivious to my surroundings that I’m even missing the times that I am the one interacting with them when I quench a nighttime thirst. On the other hand, just in case it is the house fairies and they’re finally going to get around to actually working around here I want to keep them happy. If that means letting them drink my water, who am I to argue?

I certainly don’t want to make waves.

 

Subconsciously Yours

Michael Leave a comment

Does anybody have any idea what our minds actually do while we are sleeping? Let me explain. Since I got out of the hospital my body has taken revenge for all those weeks that I ignored it and is making life challenging. Perhaps due to the rigors of physical therapy and a twice daily set of exercises designed to satisfy the Marquis de Sade, I am asleep every night by 8pm, up again around 2am for an hour or so, then back to sleep until 6 or 7. It’s during that second phase that the mind is now joining the body in a quest to make me wake up most mornings with “huh?” on my mind.

I rarely remember my dreams. Sometimes I’ll get a snippet of the movie my sleeping subconscious played for me, but most often I wake up blissfully ignorant of what went on inside my head those few hours. All that has changed recently.

Now I’m waking with vivid details of the sleep show. And I’ve figured out where they are coming from. One recent day I heard Pinball Wizard on the radio. I recall that iconic rock opera as one of my favorites from overture to finale. Throughout the day I was humming and singing (just to myself in my head) that famous modern aria. The next morning I arose fairly exhausted from having been chased by a silver ball in a life-size pinball machine never finding the drain that would have saved me from exhaustion.

A day or two of returned blissful ignorance and then it happened again. I was reading a novel, a favorite past-time, but was really too sleepy to have been reading with any concentration. As a result I kept reading the same passage over and again. I was at the part in the story where the good guy had chased the bad guy to a concert hall then to the concert hall’s basement, then to its sub-basement. Sure enough, the next morning found me waking wondering how I had become the good guy and chased the bad guy through several sub-basements including a fruit cellar, wine stores, utility rooms, a secret laboratory, a bomb shelter, fur storage, and garage. When I finally cornered the villain trying to hotwire a 40 year old MG Midget he surrendered and we rode an escalator back to the surface.

Then there was the day I read in the paper about the upcoming art show in the city and woke up the next morning having wondered why I was painting a geometric abstract including the use of a carpenter’s square and a hand held scientific calculator straight out of the 1970s. And I was painting this masterpiece from inside the canvas.

So you can see why I’m leery of going to bed at all tonight having spent the day craving ice cream. I guess I should wear my flannel pajamas – just in case.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

Sleeping in Heavenly Peace

Michael Leave a comment

Some people think the best way to fall asleep is in total darkness and complete silence.  Not here.  We find it much easier to fall asleep to somebody droning on about something.  The 11:00 news is usually good for that.  Flip the television on, tune to one of the favorite local news shows, set the timer for a half hour, and slumber will come long before the weatherman traces his first isobar.

That’s the way it used to be for He.  Now he’s up every couple of hours and every couple of hours it becomes a new chore to fall asleep.  With the modern multi-hundred-channel cable system it should be easy enough to find a droner somewhere, but as the hours get later the choices for an electronic sedative get fewer.  This was a conversation He had with himself a few nights ago.

“Ok, let’s see what we have here.  Oh good, four Duck Dynasty episodes until the paid programming comes on. If I don’t fall asleep at least I’ll have something to watch for a while.  No, I can’t watch that.  I’ll get wrapped up in whatever they’re doing and actually want to watch it.  Oh look, ‘Kindergarten Cop’ is on.  ‘It’s not a tumor.’  Best line from that movie.  Actually the only good line from that movie.  What else do we have?

“Movies, movies, movies.  All of them already started.  I hate coming in the middle of a movie even if I have seen it a thousand times.  Geez, ‘Tin Cup’ is on again.  There must be some golf tournament on this weekend or why would they play that in November?  Why not, they play it every month anyway.  Every day sometimes.  No movie.  I’ll be asleep before I get into it.  What about one of those classic television channels?

“Car 54 Where Are You?  Really?  Really.  Let’s see what that’s all about.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.  Oh no, Dragnet with even less personality.  Back to the real channels.

“Hmm, Pawn Stars?  No, they’ll have something really interesting and I’ll want to stay up and watch it but I’ll fall asleep and won’t remember it from the last time I saw it.  I meant to go see that place the last time I was in Vegas.  I wonder why I didn’t?  That’s right, dinner with the boss and his boss and a dozen other bosses.  Next time.

“Well if I don’t find something soon I’ll be asleep.  Ha.  Did you hear that?  Of course I did, I’m right here.  Now where were those duck guys?”

And so it goes every couple of hours.  Droning on about finding something to drone on.  Hmm.  That could be the new sedative.  Just don’t tell the people at work about that.

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?